It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.

The Democrats continue to refuse to provide the funding for DHS to address the border crisis that exists along the dangerous and highly porous U.S./Mexican border while complaining about the conditions in which illegal aliens, particularly alien children, are being housed in detention facilities that were never designed to handle the number of aliens currently being housed within their over-crowded confines.

On June 25, 2019 Fox News reported, “Dem-led House passes $4.5B bill to aid migrants at border, setting up showdown with GOP-led Senate.”

In this episode of “JW Inside Report,” investigative reporter Luke Rosiak of The Daily Caller discusses his findings on the Awan Bros/Democrat IT scandal in his new book “Obstruction of Justice.”

A Democratic IT staffer named Imran Awan was arrested in July 2017 on charges of bank fraud. He was employed with Debbie Wasserman Shultz and other congressional members. He is also a suspect in a cybersecurity investigation, having been banned from congressional networks earlier in the year. In addition, his relatives, also government IT employees, are currently being investigated for alleged involvement in defrauding the federal government as well as compromising sensitive information from congressional servers. Check out Luke’s new book HERE

Mexican journalist Alex Backman has released a stunning expose on the caravan from Central America. He says the migrants are robbing and stealing in Mexico. They carjack cars containing just one occupant. There are even accounts of rapes. Many of the migrants will not let people film them. If they see someone filming them through a car window, they stop the car and demand the phone. Backman suspects the reason they don’t want to be filmed is because they have criminal histories.

He said the Mexican president hasn’t done anything to stop it. The Mexican government is instead providing them with necessities including medical aid. This despite the fact that 48 percent of Mexicans disapprove of the caravan. Almost 2,700 Central Americans have applied for asylum in Mexico since the caravan started. However, the Mexican government says it does not have the resources to house all the caravan members for six months.

Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández told Vice President Mike Pence that “the caravan was organized by leftist organizations.” Left-wing organizations are providing assistance. They include the coalition CARA Family Detention Pro Bono Project, which stands for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, the American Immigration Council, the Refugee and Immigration Center for Education and Legal Services and the American Immigration Lawyers Association. At least three of the groups are funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.

Of course, exposing this is risky, because the left is fond of denying that Soros funds its ventures, labeling anyone who points out the connection as a conspiracy theorist. Kelly Johnston, a vice president at Campbell Soup, was fired after he tweeted about Soros funding the caravan.

Officials from the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense announced Monday 5200 additional active duty U.S. troops will be deployed to the southern border with Mexico by Friday. Eight-hundred soldiers are on their way to Texas now.

“They are in fact deploying with weapons,” U.S. Northern Command Air Force General Terrence O’Shaughnessy said during a press conference. “I think the President has made it clear that border security is national security.”

Troops are being sent to bolster border security in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas as at least three caravans from Central America make their way through Mexico and toward the United States. The caravans pose a special threat due to their size, which range from 3,000 people to more than 10,000. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, at least one caravan near Guatamala, Mexico has used violent tactics to breach a number of international borders.

“Due to the large size of the potential caravans that may arrive at the border, the Department of Homeland Security has further requested the support of the Department of Defense,” McAleenan said. “We will not allow a large group to enter the U.S. unlawfully.”

Troops will be used to build fencing, provide medical units, harden points of entry and address key gaps in points of entry. Air and ground transportation will be provided to move agents and equipment. This support requires military planning teams and heavy equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters and fixed wing aircraft.

One-thousand additional Customs and Border Protection officers and agents are also being deployed to handle operations.

More evidence has surfaced about the disturbing political coverup of grave national security violations committed by the Pakistani who ran House Democrats’ information technology. His name is Imran Awan and last year he was arrested on bank-fraud charges at Dulles International Airport in Washington D.C. while trying to flee to his native Pakistan. Even after getting fired by some members of Congress for stealing computers and data systems, Florida’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then Democratic National Committee (DNC) chair, kept him and let him have access to her emails and files as well as the password to the electronic device she used for DNC business. At one point, Awan had access to the computers of dozens of members of Congress, including those on the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees. Judicial Watch has launched an investigation and is pursuing public records.

The government’s bizarre failure to prosecute Awan for the national security violations he appears to have committed points to a political coverup that’s dangerous, craven and borders on traitorous. A House Office of Inspector General investigation determined earlier this year that Awan and his relatives committed numerous violations of House security policies, including logging into the House Democratic Caucus server thousands of times without authorization. The same news agency that reported that story published alarming new revelations in the case this month, concluding that “Democrats appear to want to keep the case out of court” because “a trial could expose their reckless IT practices.” It turns out that, not only has Capitol Police failed to make any arrests, it inadvertently gave evidence to defense attorneys that was supposed to go to prosecutors. It gets better; prosecutors appear to be sharing information with someone on Capitol Hill who in turn is leaking it to Awan’s lawyer.

Here is an excerpt from the news article published just a few days ago: “The Capitol Police turned over a trove of evidence in the alleged Imran Awan House cyberbreach and theft case to the defense attorneys when they were supposed to deliver it to prosecutors instead, according to court documents and a source.” Someone inside government apparently tipped off Awan’s lawyer, Chris Gowen, that a reporter was digging around for information on the Capitol Police’s suspicious mistake involving the mishandling of evidence. Gowen, a former public defender in Miami Florida, worked for Bill Clinton and on Hillary Clinton’s failed 2008 presidential campaign. The exchange of information (known as discovery) in a federal criminal case occurs between prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s Office and defense lawyers by either registered mail or a third-party copy service. Law enforcement is never involved, according to federal law enforcement sources contacted by Judicial Watch.

Legal experts and veteran federal agents contacted by Judicial Watch say something smells rotten in this case. The so-called inadvertent disclosure to Awan’s defense team by Capitol Police was intentional for one of two reasons, the experts assert. Perhaps the prosecution is alerting the defense of particular facts of the case to generate cooperation and further the probe into political figures. “This is possible because prosecutors are always gun shy when it comes to prosecuting political figures, especially the figures who may be culpable in the case,” said a longtime Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official who has worked on similar cases. “They do not want to go to trial for a number of reasons, so they are showing their hand to induce a plea with cooperation.”

The second reason, according to Judicial Watch’s sources, is that there is corruption and the inadvertent disclosure was purposeful to help bolster the defense without being obvious and backing down in court. “Either way, something is up,” a longtime federal agent told Judicial Watch. “I have never heard of anyone at the federal level inadvertently handing over documents to the defense en mass like this, never happens.” Chris Farrell, Judicial Watch’s Director of Investigations and Research, maintains that “the Awan case has all the characteristics of a major national security crime, specifically, 18 USC Sec 793(f),” which carries a punishment of up to 10 years in prison. A former military intelligence officer specializing in counterintelligence and human intelligence, Farrell added that treating the Awan case as anything less than a major national security crime is either negligence or complicity. “The bungled handling of evidence is disgraceful and amateurish,” Farrell said, adding that “the effort to bury, constrain and minimize the Awan case is deeply disturbing, and points to the need for a legitimate, full investigation by a competent law enforcement agency with substantial experience in counterintelligence and cyber-crime arenas.”

The United States is in the midst of the most resounding policy shift on cyber conflict, one with profound implications for national security and the future of the internet. The just-released U.S. Cyber Command “vision” accurately diagnoses the current state of cyber conflict and outlines an appropriate new operational model for the command: since cyber forces are in “persistent engagement” with one another, U.S. Cyber Command must dive into the fight, actively contesting adversaries farther forward and with more agility and operational partnerships.

The vision, however, ignores many of the risks and how to best address them. Most importantly, the vision does not even recognize the risk that more active defense – in systems and networks in other, potentially friendly nations – persistently, year after year, might not work and significantly increases the chances and consequences of miscalculations and mistakes. Even if they are stabilizing, such actions may be incompatible with the larger U.S. goals of an open and free Internet. More here including the critique of the report.

*** Meanwhile we know all too well about Russia and China’s cyber espionage, yet when proof surfaces by hacking into their documents for evidence… both countries begin another denial session. And Trump invited Putin to a bi-lateral meeting at the White House? Any bi-lateral meeting should take place outside the United States in a neutral location like Vanuatu or the Canary Islands…

TheTimes: Russian attempts to fuel dissent and spread disinformation have been exposed by a cache of leaked documents that show what the Kremlin is prepared to pay for hacking, propaganda and rent-a-mob rallies.

Hacked emails sent by Moscow-linked figures outline a dirty-tricks campaign in Ukraine, which was invaded on the orders of President Putin in 2014. Experts said that they exposed the dangers faced by Britain and its allies because Russia used the same weapons of disinformation, bribery and distortion to attack the West.

Bob Seely, a Tory MP and expert on Russian warfare, said his analysis of the leaks, which comprise thousands of emails and a password-protected document related to the conflict in Ukraine, revealed a “shopping list of subversion”.

“There is overwhelming evidence that the tools and techniques of Russian covert conflict are being used in and against the UK, the US and the EU,” he added. “In the wake of the Skripal poisoning it’s more important than ever that we understand these methods.”

The cost and extent of tactics were disclosed in a third tranche of the so-called Surkov leaks, named after Vladislav Surkov, a Kremlin spin-master said by some to be Mr Putin’s Rasputin.

Two previous tranches, published online by Ukrainian Cyber Alliance, a hacker activist collective, were said to include emails from an account linked to Mr Surkov. He has been closely involved with the management of Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, two Russian-controlled “statelets” in Ukraine established by pro-Moscow separatists.

The latest publication appears to contain emails found in accounts linked to Inal Ardzinba, Mr Surkov’s first deputy, and to a Ukrainian Communist party leader. They suggest that the Kremlin paid local groups and individuals in Ukraine that were willing to advance its aim to fracture the country.

One set of correspondence from October 2014, which appears to have been sent by a Russian politician to Mr Ardzinba, contained proposals to fund cyberoperations, including hacking email accounts for between $100 and $300. A wider plan to “troll opponents”, “demotivate enemies” on social media, and amass the personal data of targeted individuals in Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, was priced at $130,500.

The Russian foreign ministry has denied in the past that Mr Ardzinba has had anything to do with propaganda in Ukraine. According to Mr Seely, the leaks appear to reveal plans to plant new historical and philosophical ideas. The emails also include an event and two books that would claim that an area of Ukraine had Russian heritage.

Other proposals included the orchestration of anti-Ukraine, pro-Russia rallies. These involved the transport of “sportsmen” trained in martial arts to agitate at the rallies, bribes to local media to feature the protests and bribes to police to turn a blind eye. A month of rallies in Kharkiv was priced at $19,200. It included 100 participants, three organisers and two lawyers. It is unclear if the rallies took place, though others orchestrated by the Kremlin did happen, the research said. Moves to get 30 ex-communist figures elected to local government were floated in June 2015, at $120,460, the leaks said.

The Kremlin has claimed in the past that the Surkov leaks are fabricated and in the information war between Ukraine and Russia falsehoods may have been planted. However, the authors of correspondence in the first two tranches confirmed their authenticity. They were supported by the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank, after an analysis of metadata.

In their analysis of the third tranche, Mr Seely and his co-researcher Alya Shandra, managing editor of an English-language Ukrainian news website, say the leaks are “very likely to be authentic”. Ms Shandra and Mr Seely plan to publish their report with the Royal United Services Institute.

Peter Quentin, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, said: “There is no reason to believe these leaks are any less credible than the previous tranches. This third tranche certainly seems to fit with the trend of well-documented subversion by Russian activists in the region.”